Alternities (35 page)

“There was a theater a lot like this in Richmond,” he said. “Every now and then the whole family used to go across the county to see a movie, as a special treat. Birthdays, mostly.”

“What did you see?”

“I can’t really remember,” Wallace said. But he did.
Invaders
.
The Wind in the Willows
. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in
Just My Luck
, Richard Thomas facing those snarling range hogs in
Old Yeller
, a sight that had given him nightmares for several days thereafter. The thriller
Train from Berlin
. No titles, he thought. It’s okay if I don’t give titles.

“I remember the last time we did it, though,” he said. “It was my thirteenth birthday. Mom thought we were going to see a nice safe patriotic movie, but she got surprised. There was a scene in a sleeper car on a train, between the American agent—a strong, silent type—and the German girl who’d helped him get back the lost files.”

“Hmmm—blonde, long-haired, fresh-faced, improbably gifted—”

He grinned. “I remember being impressed, anyway. Things got kind of heated. They didn’t really show you anything, just sounds and words in a dark room. But Mom grabbed me by the hand and dragged me out. Dad and Brian—my older brother—stayed and watched the rest of the movie.”

“Thus jumbling the moral message.”

“Thus starting one of the few really ugly arguments I ever saw my parents have, in the car on the way home. Brian and I sat in the back wondering if we were going to end up as tree food.”

She laughed sympathetically. “Do you go to movies much?”

“Not very often.” He tried to remember. Discounting an eye-opening visit to a smoker house in New Jersey during a Red run, the last time had been a month or two after he and Ruthann moved to Boston. They had thought Katie would sleep through it, but she had talked and squirmed throughout, and as a bonus befouled her diaper twice. Wallace could not remember anything of the film itself.

“This is awfully nice of you,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to see this one since I first heard about it, before Christmas.”

“You’re easy to be nice to.” God—did I really say that?

He had called with an offer to take her to a coffeehouse concert on campus, and she had countered with the suggestion of
The Jeweled Dagger
. Wallace was content for her to choose, would have acceded to any suggestion so long as he could share her company. He was happy enough that she had consented to see him again.

Their first meeting had evolved into something resembling a date. She had played him one song after another on the shop’s hi-fi, bubbling over with the honest enthusiasms of someone sharing something she loved. He had bought two cartridges for the Magic and two discs, though he had nothing to play them on. The evening ended with talk of hometowns and childhoods over coffee in the Traveler’s Club Restaurant.

But that had been two weeks ago, two frustrating weeks during which his duties either tied him to Indianapolis or took him away to even more distant places. He sent her two silly cards at the shop, called her from a motel room in Kansas City and talked for an hour at the Guard’s expense. It was not enough, not nearly. He yearned to be as powerful a presence in her life, her thoughts, as she was in his.

The theater was more than half-full by the time they reached the aisles. No theater Wallace had ever been in had had a pitch as severe or a screen as large as the curved blue-lit expanse filling the entire front wall of the theater. On the screen, shimmering letters sliding through the spectrum read “MagiCine—The Ultimate Film Experience.”

“Where?” he asked. “Down front where everyone else seems to be?”

She shook her head. “The effect is just as good back here,” she said. “And I’d rather sit in one of the doubles. They’re more comfortable.”

“Lead on.”

Following her, he found that the top half-dozen rows were composed of benchlike double-wide seats, with no chaperoning armrest to come between a couple sitting together. Gloves came off, coats were folded over backrests. He sat far to the left, giving her the choice to sit close or far away. She settled near, but not touching. They were like two magnets teetering on the edge, locked to each other but still separate.

When the lights went down, Rayne reached for her hand. Her fingers were strong, her skin warm. The answering, accepting pressure of her touch was electrifying. He traced slow teasing circles on her palm with the soft pad of his thumb. She squeezed his hand and then withdrew her own. It was postponement, not rejection. A gentle “not now.”

The screen went black, and music began—a solo cello, plucked, joined soon by a bass flute. Words, stark white print, came up slowly from the black and then vanished again. He could not sever his link with her enough to read them. He heard her gentle breathing as a song among a thousand hushed sounds, felt her heat beside him, her wholeness overlapping his.

Then the first image flashed onto the huge screen, a sticklike corpse burned to faceless anonymity and he forgot that she was there.

The audience filed out largely in silence, the few combative voices counterpoint to the hushed conversations and head shakes.

I can’t let her see
, Wallace thought frantically as the overhead lights brightened and the screen went to blue.
I can’t let her know. Jesus! Three words. That’s all they said about Norfolk during orientation.
“A nuclear accident.”
A nuclear accident. Jesus.

Only slowly did he realize that there were others in the same state, rooted in their seats, still staring blankly at the screen. He looked at Shan. Her cheeks were wet with tears, but her lips held a small, poignant smile.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded wordlessly and wiped the moisture away with both hands. “I was hoping—I don’t know, I felt—she felt right. Diana, I mean. I can see—I’m sorry.” She twisted in her seat, turning away from the screen and toward him. “I’m not quite collected yet. Are you all right?”

He took a deep breath. “Not quite. How many theaters are there like this?” Protective camouflage.

“This was your first MagiCine?”

He nodded, his lips twisting into a wry smile. “Started out with a good one.”

She let out a breath as though it had been trapped inside her for minutes. “Except this one you can’t walk out and say ‘It’s just a movie.’ ”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“Know what?”

“I never really knew what the bombs could do. What it meant—Norfolk. It was just a word.”

She smiled, and the fingers of one hand grazed the nape of his neck.

“Not your fault. You were—what, nine?”

A quick mental calculation. “Eight.”

“And I was ten,” she said, her eyes softening. “More than anything, I remember the way my parents acted. I’d never seen my father so angry or my mother so sad. I didn’t really understand why. I thought it was me, that I’d done something.”

He felt like a fraud. “A lot to take on yourself.”

“I had a good fifth-grade teacher. She helped a lot of us. We sat in a circle and she told us what had happened.” Her eyes were downcast. “Told us plainly, something my parents didn’t seem able to do. They thought they could protect us. But we needed to know. About the people who were dead and how the city was gone. Norfolk was something ugly from the adult world pushing into our world. Mrs. Lilley, she let us be adult long enough to start to understand it.”

He took both her hands in his and squeezed them, and she raised her eyes and smiled. The conversation was closing down into a trap, an invitation for him to impale himself on his own fraudulent inventions. The longer they sat there, the greater the danger would be. He nodded toward the theater ushers, moving through the rows collecting trash. “I guess they’d appreciate it if we left.”

“I guess they would.”

They gathered up their coats and started up the aisle. Near the top, something glinted on the carpet ahead of them: a new penny, face down. Wallace bent over and turned the coin face up, but left it there when he took Shan’s hand to lead her on.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, holding back.

“If you find a penny heads up, it’s lucky.”

“So they say.”

“So, when you find a penny face down, turn it over and leave it for someone else to find.”

Her face brightened. Her eyes held a quiet delight. “What a wonderful thought.”

He smiled back, but inside there was sadness. A wonderful thought, yes—one I learned from you, years ago in another place, and you years before that from your grandfather. Except it wasn’t you, after all, was it? How much are you like her, Shan Two? How much of a fool am I?

“We’d said something about calories,” he said to have something to say. “What about the Oaken Bucket, down the block? Didn’t you say the food was good there?”

“I don’t think I’m up to Sully’s.”

He held the exit open for her. “Is it too expensive? You don’t have to pay.”

She frowned. “The truth is, I’m not very hungry. Too much going around in my head.”

The snow had stopped and the skies cleared, leaving an inch-thick film of soft, cold down that sparkled in the light like the scattered stars overhead. “A drink, then. There must be someplace on the Square.”

She looked away, down the quiet street. “I think what I’d like is to go walking with you for a while. Would that be all right? Maybe down to campus to sit by the observatory and look at the sky.”

“If that’s what you want.”

She sighed. “What I’d really like is to go out to Yellowwood Forest and walk in the woods. I’d like to get away from all these walls and stop seeing Norfolk.”

“How far is it?”

“Oh, it’s too far. Ten miles. Maybe fifteen. It takes me more than an hour by bike in the summer.”

“Let’s go.”

“What?”

“It’s not summer, and you’re not riding a bike. Let’s go.”

“Are you sure?”

He drew her to him and kissed her forehead softly. “I’m sure.”

By the time they reached the park, a gibbous moon had climbed above the horizon to paint the new snow in cold light. They left the Magic in the road by the locked gate and crossed the drift-covered parking lot to where the black trunks of trees formed a surreal colonnade.

The forest was quiet save for the squeak of snow underfoot. Shan, too, was quiet, turned inside herself, and Wallace did not intrude. Her steps were unhurried, but purposeful, as though she were retracing her way to a familiar place. He dropped back and let her lead, granting her the privacy she seemed to want.

Where the trees thinned on the bank of a small frozen stream, Shan ran ahead to throw her arms around the massive gnarled and scarred trunk of a full-crowned arboreal giant. As Wallace drew nearer, she turned, resting her back against the scaly bark. Three feet above her head, the lowest limbs reached outward like sheltering arms.

“Isn’t this a wonderful tree?” she asked.

He stepped up and ran a hand over the fissured surface of an old burl, legacy of a past infection. “It’s got character.”

“I call it the grandmother tree,” she said. “It’s a white oak, like most of these. They can live seven hundred years. Can you imagine what that would be like? Seven hundred years standing here and watching the world.”

“I wonder how old this one is?”

“Two hundred—three hundred years. It was already old when this land belonged to the Algonkin and the Iroquois. When the whole state was oak-hickory forest as far as you could see, before the French started cutting trees to build their forts and their fires. Do you see how the younger trees seem to give it room, out of respect? They’re her children and grandchildren. She’s proud of them—they’re protective of her. This is a good place to grow old.”

“Nothing like this in Chicago,” Wallace said, remembering her mother’s words.

“No,” she said. “There are white-tailed deer in this forest, did you know? I fell asleep here once, and when I woke up there was a beautiful buck with a broken antler standing on the bank, drinking.”

Snow melted by his own body heat was saturating his socks, but his feet were becoming too cold-numbed to notice. “It’s peaceful here. Calming. I can see why you wanted to come here, after that movie.”

“It’s a little piece of the world that never changes. At least not on the time scale of one person. You have to have some place you can go that feels like home.”

He shivered. “I know.”

“Where is it for you? Where do you go?”

Shaking his head, he admitted, “I haven’t found it yet.”

Her smile was one of sympathy. “If you’d like, you can borrow mine until you do,” she said, spreading her hands wide in an echo of the spreading limbs overhead.

“Thank you.”

She came forward a step to hug him. “Thank you—for bringing me here.”

“My pleasure.”

She twisted and looked upward into the web of branches. “I just needed to remind myself that it was here.”

“Feeling better?”

“Yes. I’m all right now.”

“Then I guess it’s time to take you home.”

“No,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I think it’s time I took you home.”

Where Shan lived had been a polite secret between them. She had not offered the information, allowing him to pick her up at the shop because it was “convenient.” He had not volunteered that he already knew she lived upstairs, in an apartment on the second floor.

The apartment was a long wood-floored room with a brass bed at one end and a porcelain stove at the other—a railroad flat without the partitioning walls. As he removed his coat and stepped out of his wet shoes, she turned on a warm yellow lamp, then retreated toward the bed. He followed, the uncertainties he had accumulated during the drive back vanishing.

Her blouse was unbuttoned by the time he reached her, and he slipped it off her shoulders, bending his head to kiss the bare skin before discarding the garment carelessly on the floor. She reached for his belt, and it became a playful race, each undressing the other with eager curiosity. Clothing littered the rug, his mixed with hers.

When she stood nude before him, he naked before her, a tremor of uncertainty ran through his body, the newness suddenly threatening. She had had other lovers before him. Would he know how to touch her, how to please her? The anxiety must have shown on his face, for she came to him with a searing kiss, all hungry lips and teasing tongue.